Devices are known in which a bottle of air treatment agent has an upwardly projecting wick and a heater is located in the vicinity of the upper end of the wick to accelerate the evaporation of air treatment agent from the wick. The bottle, wick and heater are retained within a housing which carries an electric plug. To operate the heater the device is plugged into a wall socket. Devices of this type commonly claim to allow control of the rate of evaporation of the air treatment agents, for example, by varying the distance between the heater and the wick.
Known prior art devices suffer from the drawback of efficiency and convenience. Whilst these devices are capable of emanating large quantities of air treatment agent they generally use significant amounts of power, generally the heating element of such a device has a power consumption of greater than 2 W, and are not inexpensive to manufacture. Due to their inherent cost of manufacture it is necessary to provide replaceable refills of volatile to use with such devices. Clearly such devices are not suitable for use as a disposable device.
Furthermore, since the associated manufacturing costs of both the device and the replaceable refill intended for use with the device are not inexpensive, such devices are not suitable for use in many developing markets where the available household income is unlikely to be sufficient to support the purchase and the ongoing power consumption costs.
In addition, such devices are not suitable for use as a trial product such that a user can sample the effects of the emanated air treatment agent without necessarily committing to the not insignificant costs of the prior art device and associated replaceable refill.
The present invention intends to address the drawbacks discussed above.